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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Thomas Mullen, THE LAST TOWN ON EARTH

Very good debut novel, historical fiction. In 1918, at the end of WWI, a small lumber town in Washington state decides to quarantine itself from the Spanish Influenza, but a soldier comes, breaks the quarantine and is killed; then another solider apears. This is about how panic infects the town and why a quarantine fails. It's a dark book, about selfishness and cruelty and inhumanity under duress. Reminds me of Geraldine Brooks' YEAR OF WONDERS (plague, quarantine, 1666 England) in some ways.